RROD

…and they was singing, bye bye Miss American Pie, drove my chevy to the levy, but the levy was dry. Them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye singing this’ll be the day that I die…

This’ll be the day that I die…

I think in the future I should plan all my trips this way: spontaneously. This all started when I found my friend Bernadette online and asked her, “How’s Japan?” She’s visiting her two kids there (they’re both in JET).

She says, “It’s great, you should come out here.”

Right then and there I decided, “what the hell.” I didn’t think about it after that, not until I got home and purchased the ticket. I did it the next day. For 729 bucks I got a round trip to Narita International Airport. Over the next few weeks I added a JR rail pass and a two night stay in Unizo Asakusa Hotel so I could see Tokyo on my own. I traded 220 bucks for 20,000 yen through my bank. I bought a new carry-on suitcase (which I couldn’t carry on but whatever). I got my PTO and I didn’t look back once. Best decisions I’ve made so far. I figured I’d come to Japan and just get lost. I had a few things I really wanted to see — Tokyo, Akihabara, and Ghibli — and I saw them. I think I need time to let it all sink in; I think I need to see them again. I haven’t even touched all of Tokyo yet, and I know there will be a return trip. A longer one.

I asked a lot of friends who had been to the land of the rising sun on tips for places to see, places to eat, how to act, and how to deal with the issue of money. So I can say this for sure about the money: don’t exchange at a TravelEx foriegn currency kiosk at the airport. It’s not worth it. The day I went there they were trading yen for 78 to a dollar — the going yen rate is 90 to a dollar. They’re ripping you off. On top of that they add an 8 dollar surcharge. This is what I did: I traded 220 dollars for 20,000 yen with my bank and I brought my ATM card. You can go to various convenient stores around Tokyo and exchange money and if all else fails go to the Post Office. If there’s an ATM surcharge, I haven’t noticed it. For 10,000 yen it’s about $111 dollars. I try to pull out the maximum that I can, but I think there are different limits on the ATMs there than compared to my bank.

An important note about your bank card. Make sure your let your bank know you’ll be in Japan, or they’ll think someone’s stolen your card when you try to use it. Call them up and give them the dates. The same with any credit cards you want to use.

If you plan out traveling outside of Tokyo get a JR Pass. It’s 327 bucks right now for a 7 day, 1 Adult pass. My friend tells me that the trip from Toyama to Mito is about 300 bucks, so if you travel across the country, it’s something to consider. I’m not, but still being able to hop on the trains here is great. Note: when you get the JR Pass, you don’t actually get the pass you get a voucher for it. You can only get the pass outside of Japan; it’s for foreigners. Make sure you take the voucher with you and exchange it in Japan for the rail pass itself. It’s a small booklet. The way the pass works is that you have to show it to a JR staff member and let them wave you through to the train platforms. It’s painless really.

My trip started at 8 am on the 8th of March. I headed off to SFO and waited for the JAL ticket counter to open. By 12:25 pm I was on a plane. Eleven hours later it was 5 PM Japan time, midnight Pacific Time, and I was landing in Narita. Overcast, rainy skies. What a wonderful start to a trip.

My mom likes to say, “I bring the good weather.”

Narita doesn’t strike me as a huge airport — at least when I first walked into it. I’ve never done an international flight before, but at Narita they move you through stages. I landed in Terminal 2 and took the train to Terminal 1. At the first stage they check your passport and fingerprint you. You won’t have inky fingers afterwards — they use a scanner and get your thumbprints and ask you where you’re staying. Satisfied, they’ll send you on your way.

Stage two: you get your bags from carousel and then you go declare your stuff at customs. If you’re not carrying any kind of contraband or weird fruits and veggies into Japan or anything that’s incredibly expensive, you should be fine. While you’re on the flight to Japan, they give you the paper work to fill out so do it then and your life will be easier when you land.

After that you enter the airport proper. There’s a train terminal connected right too it and you can take it to Tokyo. Go to the travel information both and exchange your JR voucher for the pass. You have to do it at one of the ticket information centers — you walk in and sit down with someone — and not at the places that sell tickets or the ticket vending machines.

Exchange some yen to test out your card. Get on a train. I couldn’t use my JR pass right away. I’m staying for a week, but I wanted the last day of the trip to count, so that means the first day I’m without it. I bought a 1000 yen ticket for the Keisei Skyliner and rode it out to Aoto station and then made a transfer to Asakusa where my hotel was. That takes about over an hour. The N’EX does the same, but it’s 4000 yen. I’m still damn cheap.

My mom says, “I bring the good weather.” It was snowing when I left Asakusa Station. I didn’t have an umbrella or any idea where my hotel was and it was dark. So I did what any self-respecting man would do. I wandered around. I found a 7-11 and bought an umbrella for 399 yen. Don’t bother bringing your own. You can get umbrellas for dirt cheap here. I wandered until my feet were soaked and found another hotel. I tried to explain where I was going in English. She blinked at me. It’s a great start already.

We got over the language barrier. She drew me a map and I followed it. After 40 minutes I was in my closet-sized hotel room. There’s a double sized bed, LCD TV, tea set, a small table, and a bathroom complete with fancy toilet. They give you PJs. Internet was free. It was also past ten and there weren’t many places open to eat, but I found one of the meal ticket restaurants and bought some rice and curry. “Arigotou,” I told the chef and was on my way back to sleep. I had been awake, by my guess, for 16 hours.

Death Note. I guess by now it’s fairly old. It was on Adult Swim a few years back, but it’s all on Hulu.com now (all 37 episodes) and free to watch. It’s subtitled and in 480p and free, and the show is damn excellent. If you’ve heard all the stuff in the news about kids emulating the “Death Note” and think it’s some gothy-emo thing, I feel that does this show a disservice.

The show is about a boy named Light Yagami who finds a Death Note dropped by a Shinigami named Ryuk. The Death Note is like a very nice composition book you might by at Hot Topic, except when you write someone’s name in their they die in 40 seconds — it’s the notebook of the grim reaper after all. Light wants to rid the world of crime and begins to kill criminals to create a utopian society. A brilliant and idiosyncratic detective that goes by the alias ‘L’ hunts him down. L is to Sherlock Holmes as Light is to Moriarty. The show is largely about Light manipulating the rules of the Death Note’s usage to throw L off his scent and L one-upping him with brilliant logical deductions. I feel that sometimes the show takes a leap of faith, but its damn engrossing and some scenarios in the show are flat-out awesome.

K-ON! This is a slice-of-life anime about the four girls — Ritsu, Mio, Tsumogi, and Yui — in the Light Music Club. They start a band together and dream of playing in front of a live audience. Yui the show’s main character and she knows jack about music. The girls rope her into playing the guitar, and she seems to pick it up like some kind of idiot savant. A lot of the show has a lot of fan service and moe moments and within the 12 epsiode arc it does start to repeat itself towards the end, but thankfully its short. The best part had to be Yui’s transformation from a complete slacker to someone with a passion for something. I also particularly love the opening and ending credit sequences. School girls with guitars looks cool, but Haruhi proved that. BTW, this anime also reminds me of LindaLindaLinda, which is worth watching too.

Maria-sama ga Miteru (seasons 1-4). How do I begin to describe this anime? Well, it’s a yuri (girl-girl) anime. An even better question: how do I explain why I enjoyed watching it so much?

The anime’s set at the Lillian’s Academy for Girls and focuses around the Yamayurikai or “Mountain Lily Council.” Even the student council name as the word “yuri” embedded into it, so you know what you’re in for. The school has this “sister” system where an upperclassman takes an underclassman as a “sister” — which after watching the show and reading the bits of manga online, seems to be more akin of a marriage proposal and creates this artificial generational lineage of girls, which I find somewhat interesting. The story focuses around Yumi, a freshman, who’s taken as the younger sister to Sachiko. I think a lot of the Marimite fans think Yumi’s a bit of an idiot, which she is at times, but I figured her redeeming trait was that she was somewhat perceptive of other people’s feelings and thoughts. As much as this show is about Yumi and Sachiko, all of the other characters in the show have their moment to shine and I can always pick out something new and interesting about each of them — my favorites being Yoshino, Sei, Youko, Eriko, and Shimako. The best moments by far are the ones with Sato Sei and Shimako.

Some episodes in seasons 1 and 2 are a bit overly melodramatic, but what do you expect it’s a shoujo.

Kimi ni Todoke. Yet another shoujo anime, but it struck a chord with me. I immediately understood the main character Sawako “Sadako” Kuronuma. She’s a loner but she means well and tries to make friends and do good deeds. I feel like, in some respect, I have a lot in common with her. Her nickname’s Sadako after the character from the Ring, The show has a lot to do with inner monologues and trying to understand one another’s feelings. I don’t really know what else to say about this one, except that it made me happy that it exists.

Densha Otoko. Or “The Train Man.” This is the j-Drama not the movie. The plot is a somewhat legendary tale from Japan, I suppose. Cute girl on train gets harassed by drunkard. Otaku stands up to him. Girl sends Otaku a thank you gift. Otaku goes onto 2ch and tries to deal with this new experience. Otaku changes his life. They fall in love. The show itself is painful to watch since the Otaku, code-named Densha Otoko, literally grovels and begs forgiveness every time he’s with his girl or talking to the people online. The best part of this show are the forum posters. They’ve all got wonderfully outrageous personalities and obsessions.

Produce wo Nobuta. It’s My Fair Lady or Pigmalion set in a Japanese high school. The idea is that two boys (this show is apparently some vehicle for their boy band, I think) come together and help the new, unpopular girl become likable. They will produce her like Disney produces Hannah Montana. So the idea is that they teach her how to become popular. They change her look, only slightly. They try to make her more adorable and confident. What I loved about the show was the role reversal — they showed her how to be popular, but Kotani teaches them a lesson in humility.

First Squad: The Moment of Truth. Its set during World War II. The SS are using occultism to raise the dead to fight the Soviets and a girl named Nadia has to stop them. The whole time I was watching it, I kept thinking, that anime is branching out. Here is a gem lying in the midst of all the moe and fan service animes. It’s loaded with cool and interesting ideas. It’s nicely animated and definitely something unique to watch. I think it stands above the traditional anime fair.

Summer Wars. A kid gets a math problem on his cell phone and he solves it without realizing that in doing so he breaks the encryption on a vast social networking site and allows an AI hacking bot to corrupt it. The social network is called Oz and you can think of it like facebook but more. It’s not just a social network it’s the social network. Everything is on it: water works, fire departments, video games, news media, everything. When the AI goes crazy and starts to steal people’s accounts it gains knowledge about businesses, government, and military. The other aspect of this movie is that it’s about family. The movie takes place at a large Japanese estate where the entire extended family is together to celebrate their mother’s 90th birthday. As soon as the AI wrecks havoc all over the city, it’s mom to the rescue and they all come together to save the day. This flick is filled with cool visuals and extraordinary attention to details (including real world objects). The issue I have with this movie is the computer hacking. Hollywood tends to make computer hacking silly looking (anyone remember Jurassic Park or Swordfish — they were still cool movies, but come on). I’ve got a computer science degree and I’m pretty damn sure if you wanted to write a computer virus, it would not be the same as Hugh Jackman forming a cube. Summer Wars falls a bit into this territory — and for the sake of art, it’s amazing looking. I will say this, they did show a guy coding to help save the day towards the end, so it’s doing a serviceable job to those who code.

That’s a boat load of stuff I’ve watched in the last few weeks and I hope it gives you some new and unique things to watch. Watching stuff hasn’t been the only thing I’ve been doing. I’m writing a novel and its an ongoing project that is soon nearing its completion — for a first draft. I even participated in National November Writing Month this year.

Oh, and Uncharted 2. The PS3 just found its killer app. It’s the sole reason that console even exists.

Field of Dreams, originally uploaded by AlbinoGrimby.

Stephen King On Writing. A friend recommended this book after I told him I was reading books I writing, in the hopes of gaining new insights into the craft. I’ve finished Stein on Writing by Sol Stein and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Both are great books. Stein focuses on the craft of writing and its good reference to have hanging around. Lamott’s book gives me the permission to write shitty first drafts and to be entirely neurotic over my writing if I want to be — at least when I read her book, I had from time to time experienced everything she talked about dealing with the psychology of other people reading and critiquing your work. The first half of King’s book are autobiographical anecdotes about his life and the road he traveled to become a bestselling novelist. I’ve started on the second half of his book which are his thoughts on the craft itself. Believe it or not, I’ve actually never read a King novel. I’m not a big fan of horror so it never struck my fancy.

Starting Point 1979-1996. You wouldn’t really guess that this was a book on Hayao Miyazaki by the title alone, but it’s a 500 page book of interviews, lecture transcriptions, and articles about the man and his animated works. Since I’m a huge fan of Ghibli films, it’s a treat to see how he created all those movies and what his thinking was behind them. He shares a lot of his wisdom on our relationship to nature, animation, and the creative process. He tells stories from his days at Toei Animation up to Princess Mononoke and I feel that I’ve gained some further insight as to how I should be acting as a professional. This book would also fall under that category of “reading books about writing” or at least about the creative process. What I found most interesting about the Ghibli process was that Miyazaki doesn’t start with a fleshed out script. He has these things called continuity sketches, which I guess are storyboards, and he goes with the flow from scene to scene, and then hopefully by the end he’s got a plot of some kind.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. It’s a comic book, but I actually think comics are legitimate forms of literature, especially Japanese ones, since they don’t have the preconceptions of what comics are supposed to be. Their entire culture is saturated with comics, and sure, most of it “read it on the john” stuff, but once in a while a few gems stand out. Akira is one of them. Ghost in the Shell is another. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is my favorite. This Tolkienesque story is the brainchild of Hayao Miyazaki. He wrote the comic before his studio, Ghibli, animated the movie back in 1984. On that note, you should watch the movie. Really, any Ghibli movie. I can recommend many of them for you.

Les Miserables. I’m slogging through this one. It’s 1460 pages for Christ-sake, but I’m more than midway through. So far my only impression is that Victor Hugo is a long-winded gasbag. I get he loves Paris so much he would marry it. It’s a long meandering tale with entire 60 page sections of the novel devoted to specific points of French history or places in Paris. The actual story bits are fun to read. The history lessons, not so much.

So that’s it, that’s what I’m doing to help my writing along. I’m in that reading mood and I may spend more time this month just picking up books and absorbing them to put new ideas in my head before I start writing new stories.

While I was doing all this updating another friend, Scrabecake, asked “You going to update it once and a while?”

“My blog or twitter?” I respond.

“Your blog!”

Consider it updated with much more to come. I’ll try and keep it down low with the random bits and bring this site back to what I originally intended it to be, a blog for sharing my short stories. I write every morning now and I try to get some time in during the evening too (I suppose this counts).

I thought Ubuntu 8.04 was slow, but 9.04 so far as actually made my laptop even slower. Opening firefox is still slow but now openOffice 3.0 works in crawl mode even when all I want to do is scroll down using the scrollbar. Is that too much to ask for? Plus Jenky Jenkalope has already crashes twice in the past 30 minutes. Apparently trying to change folders will do that trick. Trying to do anything basic causes massive CPU usage.

Now, I’m not entirely sure if this is Jenkelope’s fault. I am running Ubuntu on a laptop that was originally running a Sony butchered version of Windows XP Home, and I know that this laptop doesn’t like to run much else. I was initially surprised with Ubuntu because without much hassle, muss or fuss I was able to just install it and it ran and detected everything on this machine. Well, everything except the ATI card, because Linux as shit for ATI support. I saw the new ATI drivers. I wasted a day trying to install it only to end up with Ubuntu greeting me with its safe mode, graphics-failed-to-initialize mode. It’s a total bitch to try and fix the graphics it it goes belly-up too.

I really wanted to love Ubuntu because it claimed to usher in some new age of computing that would free me from the Microsoft ball and chain, but so far I’m not impressed. Linux is the kind of computing platform that’s supported by good intentions and alturism. It makes people feel good because its the people’s OS. Made by people, for people, which is where the African word Ubuntu comes from. A million code monkeys sitting at a million computers tapping out and compiling the greatest set of computing tools that you could ask for, but I feel that none of the software is up to snuff. Why does openOffice Writer feel so slow when I go to move the scrollbar? Does my 1.7 Ghz laptop computer, which in its heyday was a grand machine capable of running HL2 without a hitch, not have the processing power to handle a scrollbar? I want to believe that GIMP and Inkscape might oneday replace Photoshop and Illustrator/Flash, but I doubt it. The verb “Photoshop(ped)” has now entered mainstream venacular; I don’t think you’ll hear someone saying that an image got “GIMPped” any time soon. This isn’t to say that I don’t believe in open source software. openOffice on Windows is very good. Blender is an excellent 3D modeling and otherwise complete Maya replacement solution.

As for me, I think I’m going to switch back to using Windows on this laptop. My experiment into using Ubuntu didn’t totally fail; it’s just not a good experience for me. I want to use my OS and not tinker with every little thing under the hood to make it run like a normal windows machine might. I do also have a new experiment which I hope to be trying soon: a Macintosh. I’ve decided to make the plunge into the world of OS X. I’m hoping that a company that custom builds their machines to work with their OS and software will transcend simple good intentions and give me a good user experience.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4632991n

And the restaurant itself:

http://www.heartattackgrill.com/

Scantly clad nurses, check.

8000 calorie burger, check.

French Fry bar, check.

Today is a good day to die.